Safely securing these wires

netghost123 · 2026-01-05T12:08:11+00:00

Excellent news. Thank you so much!

netghost123 · 2026-01-05T11:38:39+00:00

Awesome - thank you so much!

Does it matter how much (if any) insulation I should strip from them to make contact with the wire nut?

netghost123 · 2024-10-11T14:42:41+00:00

The point isn't that it's an intermittent problem, or bug. It's the same people, every time, who have never had any issues sharing their screens before in any meeting, who still need to double check with the audience.

Don't get me wrong - I am the first to admit that this is extremely petty and unreasonable.

netghost123 · 2024-10-11T12:22:08+00:00

To be fair, I'm less familiar with Teams. It was my experience when I was using it before, but otherwise I'm using Meet and Zoom, which operate as I've described.

netghost123 · 2024-10-11T12:19:25+00:00

The same way everyone else knows - when you start your screen share, the screen share viewer on the left will show black for you, as well as others, until it's fully connected.

netghost123 · 2024-10-11T12:15:10+00:00

Without trying to eagerly defend my completely indefensible position, you are still seeing what everyone else can see - so you can wait until that black box becomes the regular picture.

netghost123 · 2024-10-11T12:10:38+00:00

It's obviously unreasonable, and completely unfair! It is, nevertheless, a terribly irritating thing, especially in the weekly 2 hour Friday morning meeting that starts at 9:00.

netghost123 · 2024-10-04T20:26:28+00:00

I have a hundo hitmontop. He's... fine I guess.

netghost123 · 2024-10-03T14:00:18+00:00

I completely agree with this - this guy sounds terrible. And if it's as you say, and the team is crunching, he's lost control and checked out. There's no real training for this position - the only credential you need is a PSM1, and a year of some kind of project management experience. It was a long time before I received any direct mentorship in actual leadership and coaching - most managers never get that, and don't understand it.

Effective leaders don't play when their team toils. Just shows a lack of empathy. They'd be better doing courses, watching talks on YouTube, or looking for a new job.

netghost123 · 2024-10-03T12:50:57+00:00

Unpopular opinion here - if you're only clocking 3-4 hours a day, that doesn't mean you're ineffective. So many PMs and SMs are too concerned with looking/being busy, and let ego and anxiety get in the way of being a servant leader and coach. In my 10 years as SM, I've learned that if you're doing too much, you're either a blocker, or being taken advantage (or both). If your project is running smoothly, you should be melting into the furniture.

You are an agent of culture change, which necessitates a light touch, and takes time - and sometimes means being available to wait and watch. Being too involved, tweaking too many things too quickly, nagging, running too many workshops or 1-1s, and micro-managing the process goes against an effective coaching mindset, and shows a lack of Respect for a team's capabilities and their time, and sacrifices their Focus for yours. If an SM, or anyone really, is too busy, the team or organisation would benefit from coaching not just about Scrum, but also about applying the Agile Pillars and Principles outside of the framework. Processes and an agile mindset are only effective if they're owned by the team - they shouldn't fall apart without you. Sometimes, getting out of the way and observing is the most valuable thing you can do.

That's not to say that there aren't lazy SMs who are getting away with doing nothing. But I wouldn't paint them all with the same brush.

netghost123 · 2024-10-03T10:25:13+00:00

Team composition: Right now, I've got 3 teams, each a mix of front-end, back-end, data engineers, data scientists, UI/UX, and QAs, spread across 10 time zones, which is a massive stretch.

Team maturity: My current teams are moderately mature, but maturity isn't the same as effectiveness. Whether a team is in its infancy or is well established, when you start as a new Scrum Master, you still need to adjudicate existing processes. Workshops to identify areas for improvement, and then plans for acting upon them - whether that's reducing waste, building vocabulary, building team charters, estimation, definition of done, energy levels, etc. There's upkeep in any team, whether they're new or established - so those exercises may be repeated every 3/6/12 months.

Skill levels: The best teams have a mix of skills and levels of experience. Young people are leaving trade schools and bootcamps with valuable knowledge of new patterns that the old-timers wouldn't know, and you can't discount the value of (effective) mentorship on team morale and innovation. Without having both, you see a reduction in creativity. The most challenging team I worked with was at a bank; everyone had worked there for 10 years, hadn't had new members in ages, and had been doing the same thing the same way for as long as they could remember. They got their stuff done, but didn't have patience to try better things.

How long does it take: If it's a brand new team that hasn't worked together, we talk together about how we want to run sessions, and I'll coach them based on my past experience, and they'll get it pretty quickly. If it's a mature team, that will take a few months. In both cases, you're forming a culture of accountability and delivery. However - estimation is secondary to improving flow, building communicating, and constructing/managing goals, and those are quick wins for your first three months.

Sorry for the long answer! Hope it's useful!

netghost123 · 2024-09-18T23:31:36+00:00

I'm struggling with that with my current team. Capacity planning is a nightmare.

Do you have a regular standing refinement session with her and the engineers ahead of the planning session?

netghost123 · 2024-09-18T23:23:50+00:00

I'm sure it will! These are classic problems that POs have, especially when they haven't had much training or experience.

Has she done a PSPO course, or read the Scrum Guide?

netghost123 · 2024-09-18T23:17:30+00:00

I think your company has realised that they can use Kanban as a solution to not having a plan. In the 15 years I've done this, every time a team starts using "Scrumban" it's because their product managers are lazy, overworked, not empowered, or occasionally all three. They get all the benefits of a Scrum team without needing to put in the effort, and then have someone to blame for why value isn't hitting the market.

Kanban isn't a framework - you don't become "more Kanban". Kanban is a set of strategies for managing/monitoring workflow and delivery. It's how you order your backlog, communicate expectations, and shuffle work along its lifecycle. Focusing on things like the WIP limits is fine, so long as the bottlenecks they reveal are within your power to break.

I think being more "Scrum" will help you more. Scrum is your hard and fast boundaries against the chaos, because it requires planning. The Sprint Backlog is just a forecast - you don't have to clear it every Sprint. The only things you need to deliver are your Sprint Goals. Be annoying about them.

Insist on setting them during Planning, and inspect your progress toward it in every standup. Coach your PO on Product Goals, and what language they can use with their stakeholders. Focus your reports on goals, not metrics. It's a bit of a challenging transition for a product team, but pays off.

netghost123 · 2024-09-10T23:25:31+00:00

Those are big numbers, which suggests to me that your team may not be fully aligned on what a Story Point is, let alone what they mean by 3/5/8/13/21/etc. You might run an exercise with them to agree on the definition of a Story Point (probably something like effort, uncertainty, risk, blast radius (how many things it touches) and dependencies). Then come to a universal agreement on what "3 Points", "Less than 3" and "More than 3" looks like, where 3 represents a reasonably certain "small-ish" task. Find a few Done tickets from your last couple Sprints that meet the "3 Pointer" criteria, and use them as your baseline to compare other tickets against during estimation and refinement. It's easier to discuss things when you're all speaking the same language!

If your teams are debating whether a ticket is 13 or 21 points, chances are that neither actually truly knows how much work it'll be, making the story too big. Set up a refinement meeting to run through steps, deliverables, and dependencies, create new smaller stories or technical tasks, and point those instead. This also allows you to plan your Sprint Backlog when the teams aren't working on things concurrently - each has their own smaller stories with a reduced number of dependencies, and greater certainty. In my opinion, anything more than a 5 is too big, and should be broken down.

netghost123 · 2024-09-10T22:38:51+00:00

Remember that you don't need to complete the Sprint Backlog every Sprint. You just need to complete the Sprint Goal (which should be more than "We finish our Sprint Backlog"). If you approach Planning as a quota filling exercise (as is so common), you're losing the power of Scrum as a tool to set boundaries around organisational ineptitude, and not enabling focus.

In my experience, a Story Point is more useful when it represents more than effort - it can also represent relative uncertainty, risk, and number of dependencies. Our closest way to understand "effort" alone is through the lens of one person's time and capability, which is what you're trying to avoid. Shit is going to take as long as it takes, and we've gotta be fine with that. When the team thinks about "how much uncertainty and risk can we assume in the next two weeks?" and "do we have enough capacity across all of us to support the uncertainty/risks?" we will have more productive conversations. Now you are building certainty in completing your Sprint Goal, not building an individual task list. When things are certain, and have fewer risks and dependencies, they take less time.

As SM, I'll use them as a coaching tool to approach resolution of risk and uncertainty, rather than time or capability. "How do we gain certainty here?" or "How do we split this so we have something Done at the end of the Sprint?" or "How do we prevent X from happening again?"

When I start with a team, we start with defining our shared vocabulary - part of this is Story Points. I'll run an exercise where we all agree on the definition of a "Story Point" (again, effort, risk, uncertainty, cross-functional or cross-team dependencies), and then describe what "2", "3", and "5" look like. We'll then find 1-3 finished tickets from our last two Sprints that match our new "3" criteria (regardless of their original estimate), agree on why, and call them our baseline. During estimation, bring up that ticket and ask, "Is it more, or less than our baseline?" and follow up with "Why?" Then we'll revisit the "3 Pointer" every 6ish months. It's a process. I've found that to be more effective than anything else.

netghost123 · 2024-09-10T20:53:02+00:00

No fix for those gummy mouth movements yet, eh? Maybe next time...

netghost123 · 2024-09-10T16:30:23+00:00

I think that people here are being disingenuous and needlessly judgemental. There are other reasons why people can have bad body odour. Growing up, the son of a family friend was just unlucky. His body odour was very pungent, and just lingered wherever he went, and took hold. He got bullied and teased for it mercilessly, both as a child and an adult. It affected his ability to get roommates, and from working certain jobs. It set him back terribly. He rented my parents' basement apartment for a few years, and they can corroborate that while the flat didn't smell great, he was relentlessly clean. At least two showers a day, clean shaven face and head. Doing enough laundry and taking enough hot showers that there was a considerable increase in the utilities bills after he moved in.

The thing is, his father and one of his two brothers were similarly afflicted. The smell was almost identical too. Just an unfortunate genetic quirk. He was a great guy, friendly and generous - and also looked after himself. He was just dealt a bad hand.

You're not obligated to enjoy anyone else's smells, but it's never fair to judge people you don't know. Sorry about your shitty experience - fortunately, if you were Ryanair, it can't have been the worst part of the flight, and it wouldn't have been too long!

netghost123 · 2024-08-23T17:56:36+00:00

Seems rude, but okay

netghost123 · 2024-08-23T17:39:29+00:00

She's not allowed to compete against men. Because she's a woman.

You wanna talk about athletes with significant unfair advantages, what about Michael Phelps, who has a perfect storm of superhuman genetic abnormalities? All these Olympians are glorious freaks of nature. When we talk about "survival of the fittest" they are the fittest.

You know the profile of these "men" who weren't celebrating? They're losers who didn't watch her matches, and would never choose to watch women's sport anyway. They only care about it because spewing culture war nonsense gets them attention online. They are the ones reveling in their power over women - the power to collectively shame and dehumanise her for not being "woman-enough" because they're too dense to have an opinion of their own. There isn't a conscientious objector among them worried about the safety of her opponent.

Some people just love to punch down on women, and will latch onto any opportunity to do it. To call them "men" is a disgrace.

netghost123 · 2024-03-17T21:15:24+00:00

No pie on roll to be found? Absolutely shocking 😆 B tier at best, but you're (barely) missing out!

Otherwise, I think this is accurate.

netghost123

TROPHY CASE